JENNIFER HORNSBY VIRTUAL ISSUE NO. 1 Truth: The Identity ...

Jennifer Hornsby The Aristotelian Society Virtual Issue No. 1
!
(E) It is true that p if and only if p.
Horwich calls this 'the deflationary point of view'. In advocating a
minimal theory, he means us to think that those who have waxed
philosophical about truth in the past have tried to say too much and
overshot the mark. He believes that we are apt to have an erroneously
inflated conception of truth.
There has been so much writing under the head of 'minimalism' and
'deflationism' that in order that something should be fixed, I shall use
Horwich's position to define 'a minimalist theory'. Deflationism, on the
other hand, I shall treat as an attitude towards truth which a minimalist
theorist takes, but which is also taken by others – disquotationalists,
and, it seems, Richard Rorty. 16 In an attempt to make out the identity
theory's superiority to the minimal theory, I start by suggesting that,
despite what they have in common, there has to be a genuine difference
in their conceptions of truth. Then I suggest that to the extent that the
minimal theorist wants to convey a deflationary message about truth,
which is not already conveyed in the identity theorist's opposition to
correspondence, the message has to be resisted.
3.2 One thing that the identity theorist and minimal theorist agree about
shows up in connection with a point that Dummett once made (1958/9).
Dummett famously said that an advocate of a minimal theory is illplaced
to tell us that truth can be used to explain meaning. 17 The point
!
!
16 Disquotationalists differ from Horwich in taking the truth of sentences to be
primary, so that I have taken a stand against their position already (see n.3 above). For
criticisms of disquotationalism as such, see David 1994. Many of these criticisms have
versions applicable to Horwich's theory: in connection with Horwich they would start
from asking what is involved in the acceptance of propositions – which is the question
that I press below.
For Rorty's deflationism, see n. 21.
The characterization of deflationism here is deliberately vague (it is meant to be as
vague as the statements used to convey the deflationary message, see §111.3). But I
should note that, with Horwich's minimalist theory used as the paradigm of a theory
provoking the deflationist attitude, it is not a characteristic thesis of deflationism to
deny that truth is a predicate. Brandom 1994 takes his treatment of '... is true' as a
prosentence-forming operator to secure one of deflationism's characteristic theses. But I
think that the identity theorist's opposition to the deflationist attitude that Horwich
means to provoke might survive arguments about the correctness of pro-sententialism.
(From Brandom's position, one would see these issues in a different light. I cannot
speak to it here, but I make a further remark about it at n. 23 below.)
17 Dummett was actually talking about the redundancy theory of truth. For the
purposes of considering his argument, we may think of this as a species of minimalist
theory. Dummett himself has called Horwich's theory (which Horwich calls 'minimal')
! 16